To Upend the Status Quo

Over the past year, I co-chaired a teacher and parent effort to open
the first public charter school in Montgomery County, Md. The plan is
quite simple: Open a small secondary school focused just on the
academics, and market this challenge to mostly black and Latino
youngsters.

The only real solution available for
closing the achievement gap is academic rigor.

It is my belief, and that of the other
founders, that the only real solution available for closing the
achievement gap between these kids and their white counterparts is
academic rigor. There is no other answer, or shortcut.

Our charter school effort still has a long way to go, but positive
signals from the county board of education make us believe that a fall
2001 opening is a strong possibility.

What follows, however, is not about the "nuts and bolts" of opening
a charter school. It is about the resistance we have gotten from school
officials when we tell them that ordinary black and Latino youngsters
are capable of extraordinary academic feats. We define "ordinary" to
mean literally any youngster who walks through the school's door. Other
than having the will to do the work, students at our charter school
will have no special academic requirements to meet.

Why is this an exceptional notion—that minority youngsters can
achieve great things academically? The resistance to it centers, I
think, around a number of identifiable fears. And the use of the word
"fear" here has little to do with emotions. Instead, think Old English,
where the word actually meant "calamity or disaster." Thus, three fears
I have identified are these:

Fear of failure. Clearly, the resistance we hear coming
from many school officials stems partly from their fear that the past
will simply repeat itself, and that black and Latino youngsters will
once again fail. They always fail. They always disappoint. Now, I
will admit, the county's schools have a solid track record that gives
credence to this fear. There are far too few black and Latino
achievers, and past plans to alter this situation have all
failed.

I discussed this dismal record in African-American Males in
School and Society, edited by Vernon C. Polite and James Earl
Davis. Using W.E.B. Du Bois' turn-of-the-century call for a "Talented
Tenth," I suggested that my school system today could barely muster a
"Talented 1 Percent" among its nearly 30,000 black students. And this
condition has been validated repeatedly by researchers from outside the
district, such as A. Wade Boykins of Howard University, Gary Orfield of
Harvard University, and Edmund Gordon of Yale University.

So, after nearly two solid decades of failing black and Latino
children, it's not really shocking to hear school officials express
fearful doubts about our plans to challenge these students with
academic rigor. Why believe now? And why encourage a public calamity
through a public charter school?

Fear of fallout. School officials are afraid of the
political ramifications of further failure. This fear can
cause even the most rational high school principal to act
irrationally. Consider, for example, the all-too-frequent behavior
that surrounds SAT scores. For years, the district has had as a goal
increasing the number of black and Latino high schoolers taking this
assessment. But principals know that in the short run, pushing more
black and Latino youngsters to take the SAT may cause the average
score to drop. Black and Latino scores are already the lowest on the
test, and district leaders have publicly taken principals to the
woodshed when average scores dropped in the past. So, it is not
uncommon to hear about principals' steering black and Latino
youngsters away from the SAT, as well as other academic challenges,
such as enrollment in Advanced Placement courses.

I often get calls from parents asking me what to do about school
staff members' advising their children or other black and Latino kids
not to take the SAT. Usually, I tell them to challenge such nonsense
and, if necessary, ignore the school and go it alone. It shouldn't come
to this—schools playing the test-score game, or parents going
against the school—but the politics of race are never sane
politics. And such insanity increases when school officials think in
terms of disaster.

Fear of change. School officials fear losing control of
academic rigor. They fear any serious challenge to the status quo,
which in this district is framed by wealth and privilege. To ensure
academic rigor, my charter school will offer the International
Baccalaureate program in grades 6 through 12. There already are
charter schools in the country offering this rigorous curriculum to
all comers, and with no specific academic entrance requirements. The
IB program also is offered in several of my district's secondary
schools, but, to date, it has been treated as a scarce educational
commodity, offered mostly to white and affluent gifted-and-talented
students.

Frankly, I think this scarce commodity has been used to make white
parents feel as though they are getting a private school education for
their children without leaving the public schools. Such a prized
commodity would be cheapened, in some minds, if just "ordinary"
youngsters were provided the opportunity to rise to the occasion and
perform this more rigorous work. This is the same simple-minded
response heard throughout the country when others have attempted to
expose more minority youngsters to both honors and Advanced Placement
classes. The more affluent in the community claim that academic
standards suffer. Nonsense. Standards never suffer when more is
required of black and Latino youngsters.

When I first got involved in starting up a charter school, I knew
very little about them. Now I know more than the average educator about
charter schools, but I'm still no expert. I have stayed rather narrowly
focused on my own school, designing one local neighborhood effort to
address and erase the achievement gap.

Standards never
suffer when more is required of black and Latino
youngsters.

Perhaps by default, though, I have picked up
and started using the charter school "talk" about competition. I had
heard it all before, but I'm not sure I ever knew what it meant until I
got actively involved in a real charter school effort. And from where I
sit, it appears as though public school officials are threatened by
their first charter school application.

In the past, and even today, officials in my district have insisted
that closing the achievement gap was simply a matter of effort. If we
just believed more in black and Latino youngsters, things would change.
Practically no attention has been paid to changing how learning is
actually delivered to students. Charter schools change this reality. We
challenge the status quo that says all kids can be educated only in set
ways. These new realities may in fact be frightful to those who now
control the district.

On the other hand, I find allowing the status quo to stand much more
frightening than the risk we are prepared to take by challenging each
and every one of our youngsters with the highest academic rigor
possible. No one should fear or resist such a future.

Joseph A. Hawkins is a senior study director at Westat in
Rockville, Md., an employee-owned company that does
government-contracted statistical analysis on education and health
research.

Joseph A. Hawkins is a senior study director at Westat in Rockville,
Md., an employee-owned company that does government-contracted
statistical analysis on education and health research.

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